Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Staunton, January 31 – The conflict
between the Russian Orthodox Church and the people of St. Petersburg over the
possible return of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, long a museum on the northern capital’s
most important boulevard, has raised new questions about how many believers
there really are in Russia and why they are acting so aggressively.

In a conversation with Yuliya
Galkina, a journalist for The-Village.ru portal, Zhanna Korminova, a specialist
on the anthropology of religion at St. Petersburg’s Higher School of Economics,
argues that the Russian Orthodox are acting like an embattled minority because
they are one and feel themselves to be (the-village.ru/village/people/city-news/255979-orthodoxy).

Despite claims that more than 80
percent of Russians identify as Orthodox, only a tiny percentage, far fewer
than five percent, actually participate in religious life, Korminova says; and
that minority knows that it is both small and different from others and behaves
in the ways one expects such people to do.

“Church people,” she continues, have
chosen a particular style of life, “one that sociologists would call a
sub-culture. They have their own style of dress their own marriage patterns and
their own biographic strategies, they have a specific language and other
specific practices as well.”

Given all this, Korminova says, “they
feel themselves as a minority” that is both misunderstood and mistreated. At
the same time, “they are certain that it is they who are preserving the spirit
of the nation … and have the right to count on gratitude or at least respect from
their non-church compatriots.”

“And this bitter feeling sometimes
leads to quite sharp and even aggressive expressions as happens with any
minority which feels itself to be stigmatized” as different from the norm.

There are of course different kinds
of identification with religion. In Moscow, people are overwhelmingly loyal to
Orthodoxy but this loyalty is “on the level of official ideology.” For people
in some smaller cities, like Lipetsk, Orthodoxy is a way of life.S). And in St. Petersburg there is still a
third pattern.

The northern capital “was built as a
window on Europe,” and along the Nevsky Prospekt were “a Catholic church, an
Armenian church, a Swedish Lutheran one … and of course an Orthodox one” (St.
Isaac’s). Thus, the religious diversity of the population was institutionalized
“in the city’s landscape,” a very different pattern than the one found in
Moscow.

The reason that the recovery of St.
Isaac’s from the state is so important to the real Orthodox believers, Korminova
continues, is that they believe that this is a sign that they are making
progress and that if they have a church, it will be filled. But most of the population
view the situation differently.

They aren’t opposed to the appearance
of new churches, but not in their backyard, in their recreational spaces or
where the church is followed by the building of a cemetery, she says. “No one
wants a cemetery where he walks with his child.”In general, these two sides can’t reach an
agreement, but the Orthodox often make the situation worse for themselves.

They tell the residents: “Everything
has been decided” by the authorities and then they act “like conquerors.” They
see the recovery of a church as evidence that “this land as becoming Orthodox”
and so reacquiring churches performs much of the same function for them as does
missionary activity.

As far as the restoration of ruined
churches is concerned, something the opponents of the Orthodox often say the
religious should focus on before trying to take back existing ones in the middle
of cities, the facts are these: almost all of such churches are in places where
there are no longer any people or any parishioners.

In her concluding remarks, Korminova
throws cold water on one of the most fervent expectations of Orthodox believers
who think that the return of churches will lead to an upsurge in church participation.
For those who are genuine believers, she says, that isn’t going to matter, and
an increase in the number of churches won’t boost the size of their flocks.

Staunton, January 31 – Many commentators
have reduced the issue of continuation or replacement of the existing
federative treaty between Moscow and Kazan -- an accord that runs out this year
-- to the question of whether Tatarstan will be allowed to retain the post of
republic president, despite Russian federation law to the contrary.

But in fact, Ilnar Garifullin, a
Tatar political scientist, points out, a great deal more is riding on the fate
of that document including the status of Tatars in Tatarstan and beyond its
borders and that of all the non-Russian peoples in Russia, despite the fact
that de facto Moscow now treats the accord as a dead letter. (idelreal.org/a/28262902.html).

A key to
understanding what is at stake, the analyst says is the timing of a demand by
the All-Tatar Social Center (VTOTs) that the new power-sharing treaty must
include a provision guaranteeing Moscow’s recognition of Tatar as the state
language of Tatarstan and of the right of Tatarstan to assist Tatars outside
the borders of the republic.

The current accord, adopted in 2007
which will lapse this year, replaced an earlier one adopted in 1994, but the
second unfortunately, Garifullin says, is only “the last ‘remnant’ of the era
of sovereignization which is already far in the past.” It has little real force
because while it exists “de jure,” it
doesn’t “de facto.”

In thinking about what should be in
a third edition of this arrangement, he continues, it is important that it not
be limited to “guarantees to the power elite of Tatarstan” but rather include “guarantees
both to residents of Tatarstan and to Tatars living elsewhere in other regions
of Russia.”

That is a minimal requirement given
that Article 14 of the Constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan already confirms
that right, Garifullin continues. If a new treaty is in fact drafted and
approved, it must grant to Tatarstaan the right to “promote the preservation of
ethno-cultural and civic rights of Tatars” living beyond the borders of the republic.

The need for such a provision was
highlighted by the recent events in a Tatar school in Mordvinia where
authorities sought to impose a ban on school girls wearing the hijab, he says.
(Another analyst suggests that Moscow causes this conflict in order to weaken
Kazan’s position. See poistine.org/moskva-nepokrytaya-protiv-hidzhabov-belozerya#.WJBRuX90e-f).

Had Tatarstan been able to intervene
effectively in this case, Moscow might have had to intervene, something that at
least some officials at the Federal Agency for Nationality Policy might in fact
support, Garifullin argues.

In addition, he says, the new accord
should include a provision that the federal ministry of education and science
must take into account ethnic issues not only at the level of schools but also
at that of higher educational institutions. If the accord doesn’t do at least
these three things, “the republic doesn’t need it” because it would have no
significance at all.

Garifullin then turns his attention
to the role of VTOTs in all this,arguing that that organization which arose at the end of 1988 was in
fact behind most of the achievements of Tatarstan today, sayingthings republic officials couldnot and thereby mobilizing public opinion to
promote change.

For any years, VTOTs played the role
of “bad cop” to Kazan’s “good cop” in dealing with Moscow. Unfortunately, the analyst
continues, the republic leadership “destroyed this arrangement” and preferred
instead to “legitimate itself” on a religious basis which it viewed as “neutral
and not politicized.”

But that shift, Garifullin argues,
has led to “still greater problems,” not only opening the way for Moscow to
condemn Kazan on religious grounds but also to lead Tatars out of politics
where the old saying – “’if you don’t get involved in politics, politics will
get involved with you” – proved all too true because it cost official Kazan the
support of nationally thinking Tatars.

That has left the Kazan Kremlin
without the kind of support in the republic that it used to have and used with
such effectiveness in the 1990s.That
makes moving forward harder, but it also means that the discussion of the
power-sharing accord is much more important than just retaining the title of
republic president – and not just for Tatarstan and Tatars.

Staunton, January 31 – Russian democrats
have denounced Donald Trump’s ban on some Muslims entering the US as a
violation of human rights, while the Russian government media have been far
more restrained or even supportive of what the new president has done, the clearest
reversal in the way the two parts of the Russian political spectrum view the
United States.

In a commentary in today’s “Nezavisimaya
gazeta,” Aleksey Gorbachev, the political observer of that Moscow paper, says
that under Barack Obama, the Russian opposition generally supported official
Washington’s moves while the Russian government condemned them. Now in the
Trump era, the reverse is true (ng.ru/politics/2017-01-31/1_6916_oppozicia.html).

Konstantin Merzlikin, the deputy
head of the PARNAS Party, says that “no one prohibits a migration service from
strictly checking the admission to its country of citizens of states with a heightened
level of terrorist threat. But when such a measure is introduced … toward those
with visas and resident permits, serious questions arise about fundamental
rights and freedoms.”

He adds that in his view, “this will
produce an increase in anti-Americanism around the world.” Yabloko Party leader
Emiliya Slabunova agrees: Trump’s action, she says, “will not only deepen the
split in America and in the world community but increase the risk of new
terrorist actions.”

Sergey Mitrokhin, another Yabloko
leader, says that the wave of protests against Trump’s actions clear show just
how much what the US president has done “contradicts American civilization” because
the US is “a country of immigrants.”Imposing a religious test “not only points to double standards but raises
the risk of terrorist attacks against Americans abroad.

Moreover, according to Mitrokhin,
the order “testifies to the lack of analytic thinking in Trump and his
entourage.” Any further steps in this same direction would become a chance to
rethink the basis of [America’s] existence.”

But Russian state television,
Gorbachev says, “assess the situation differently.” Its broadcasters talk about
how Trump is “a builder of a new America” and criticize the opponents of his
immigration ban either as those who long for Obama’s time or who want cheap
labor for American factories.

According to the “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” journalist, “experts are certain that Russian media will be sympathetic
to Trump just as long as he will keep their hopes alive for the lifting of
sanctions.”Up to now, he quotes Aleksey
Mukhin, head of the Moscow Center for Political Information, they remain “in a
state of euphoria about Trump.”

Mukhin says that he doesn’t share
that euphoria because despite Trump’s “pro-Russian rhetoric,” the American
president remains “a very complex personality with whom [Moscow] will find it
extremely difficult to agree on something.”

Nonetheless, it is striking and
disturbing that Russian democrats are condemning what Washington has done while
Russian authoritarians are praising or at least not criticizing it, a pattern
that represents a departure from the past and that should be a warning signal
to those who care about democracy in all countries.